Stories of
American Heroes -
Brought to you from the "Home of Heroes" - Pueblo, Colorado

News From The
Past

October 12, 2002

Man
Of Valor

Bravery,
fortitude, heart, heroism, spirit - all synonyms for the word inscribed on
Richard Rocco's Medal of Honor, and all descriptive of the man who has spent
decades saving the lives of veterans and youths

By Kate Nelson Tribune Reporter

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - Even in Richard Rocco's
cancer-withered hand, the Congressional Medal of Honor weighs no more than a
silver dollar. But the medal's magnitude among the valiant few who have
received it surpasses the simple measure of grams, ounces and pounds.

Together, that word and that medal represent our
nation's highest military honor. They stand for the super-human heroics that
every veteran reveres. They contain the memories that no veteran desires.

For 28 years, Rocco, a poor kid from the South Valley,
has opened the medal's navy blue case. For 28 years, he has tied a sky-blue
ribbon around his neck. For 28 years, he has turned a violent memory of
Vietnam into a mighty lever, a formidable honor, an endless duty.

Barring a miracle, there will not be a 29th year.

After saving three men from a burning helicopter and
countless more from their coming-home miseries, Rocco faces his most brazen
foe.

"It's scary," he says of the cancer that
infects his lungs and spine.

His voice is a whisper, wrenched slowly, reluctantly,
from a body hunched in pain.

"I was always hoping that the medal would open
doors for Vietnam vets," he says. "There were a lot of programs that
needed to be done. Drug and alcohol treatment. Employment. Housing."

The only living New Mexican to receive the medal for
Vietnam service was among the first to see the need. He was among the first to
answer the call. In it, he found a purpose for his anger at a war that history
has shown had little purpose at all.

Presidents, generals, CEOs and junkies have hailed
Rocco's heroism, his compassion, his unfailing desire to reach out and help.

At 63, he has come full circle. He has dragged himself
through America's longest war and carried veterans through its awful
aftermath.

Now, nearing his own end, Louis Richard Rocco has
finally found peace.

* * * He was just another kid in the barrio. His roots
bore no hint of the heroism to come. "I remember Albuquerque as being a
time in my life when everything was simple," Rocco says. "We were
poor. Real poor. My father was mostly unemployed. My mother was very, very
strong."

The oldest son in an Italian-Hispanic family, he stole
potatoes and corn from neighbors' fields to feed his parents and eight
siblings.

When he was about 10, the family began a back-and-forth
regime, Beverly Hillbillies-style. A few years here in the barrios of
Albuquerque. A few years there in a subsidized housing project of San
Fernando, Calif.

On one trip, the owner of a diner refused to serve the
family when he got a look at Richard's darker-skinned brothers. One thing led
to another, and the father and the owner brawled. Young Richard stood between
them, "just trying to stop it."

His peacemaking stint was short-lived.

By 13, he was blowing it. Getting into fights, getting
kicked out of school and getting into trouble.

"I spent most of my teen-age years in jail,"
he says. "At 16, they were getting ready to send me up Őtil I was
21."

The charge was armed robbery. The future was a mess.

He had an hour to kill on the streets of Los Angeles
before his sentencing. He wandered into an Army recruiting station.

Staring at posters, he heard a voice behind him:
"Can I help you?"

Rocco turned to see a man he remembers only as Sgt.
Martinez.

"No, you can't help me," Rocco told him.
"The Army won't take me. I have a criminal record and I'm only 16."

"Why don't we sit down and talk about it?" the
sergeant said.

And so they did.

"That was the first time an adult in my life didn't
judge me," Rocco says. "He didn't try to change my mind. He just
listened, actively listened.

"And it was the first time that I spilled my guts.
All the pain and anger inside me came out."

Martinez offered to talk to the judge. They agreed that
Rocco would spend a year in a delinquency home and, at 17, his parents would
sign a waiver giving him over to the Army.

It was his last, best chance. It changed everything.

"The Army was what I needed," Rocco says.
"I didn't have a structure. I didn't have discipline. I needed that
desperately. I needed what the Army had."

A few years later, Rocco was serving as a medic at Fort
MacArthur in San Pedro, Calif. He looked across the room and saw a familiar
face: Sgt. Martinez, lying on a litter and badly wounded.

"I went up and said, `Do you remember me?' "
Rocco says. "He didn't. He had taken care of so many kids that he
couldn't recognize me.

"I told him, `You're going to walk out of here.'
"

He made sure the sergeant got special attention and
round-the-clock care.

You could say that was when Rocco saved his first life.
Rocco would say he was only returning the favor.

* * * He still remembers the heat of Vietnam. The
humidity. The stench. And the danger. "As we pulled in the first
time," Rocco says, "they were loading caskets into a plane."

If he remembers much more, he'd rather not say. The
hallmark of heroism, after all, is humility. Just doing my job. Doing what
anyone would do.

Lee Caubarreaux disagrees.

"Had it not been for him," the Louisiana
retiree says of Rocco, "three of us would have burned up in the
ship."

May 24, 1970. Rocco is on his second tour as a sergeant
first class, a medic on a helicopter evacuation crew. Called to a South
Vietnamese camp to rescue the wounded, they headed into enemy fire.

The pilot was hit. The chopper went down, landing on its
side. Caubarreaux, the co-pilot, was pinned on the bottom, his shoulder
shattered. Flames erupted.

"I looked up," Caubarreaux says. "I could
see through the pilot's door. Richard had climbed on top and opened the door.
I saw tracers in the sky behind him and thought, `Oh, Lord, if he gets shot,
we're all going to die.' "

Rocco didn't get shot. He pulled out the pilot and
carried him across 20 meters of open ground to the limited safety of a downed
tree.

He returned and helped Caubarreaux clamber out. The
gunner was already dead, but they managed to get the other medic before flames
could consume him.

Rocco helped carry each man into the jungle and began
first aid. Then he passed out.

In the crash, he had broken his hip, fractured his wrist
and injured his back. During the rescue, his hands were badly burned.

For two days, the crew huddled in explosive pandemonium.
Two helicopters were shot down trying to save them.

"We didn't know each other before then,"
Caubarreaux says. "We became closer than brothers after that. Because of
him, I still have partial use of my arm. I can't screw in a light bulb, but I
can hug my wife."

The burned medic wasn't so lucky. He spent a year in the
hospital recuperating. The day he was released, he blew his brains out.

In 1974, Rocco stood, trembling, in front of an equally
trembling President Gerald R. Ford. Rocco was about to become the only living
New Mexican to receive the Medal of Honor for service in Vietnam.

"The president told me it was the first live medal
he had placed on any soldier," Rocco says. "I told him that it was
the first medal I had ever got."

* * * More than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam
War. In the eight years after the 1975 fall of Saigon, an estimated 60,000
veterans died from self-destructive behaviors. Suicides. Gunfights with
police. Drug overdoses. Car crashes.

"We all experienced some of those problems,"
Rocco says. "Everybody had depression. Everybody had anger. Everybody had
rage. And there was nothing set up for us. No jobs. No housing. Nothing.

"We felt very betrayed."

Juan Jos‚ Pe¤a, an Army veteran and a Spanish
translator for federal court, met Rocco in Albuquerque in 1978.

"He was starting to have some meetings in his
backyard," Pe¤a recalls. "We'd build a bonfire, pull out the
grills. That's when we started discussing establishing an organization for
Vietnam veterans in New Mexico."

Rocco, movie-star handsome and a bit older than other
vets, became their leader, their role model, their godfather.

In a few years, he had established the Vietnam Veterans
of New Mexico. He opened the Vet Center, where he developed a system of vets
counseling vets. He became director of the state's Veterans Service
Commission.

Always, he harangued politicians and philanthropists to
join the cause.

"When a Medal of Honor winner calls a general or a
corporate head, those guys jump through the roof just to meet him," says
John Garcia, an Army veteran and executive director of the Barelas Community
Development Corp.

"Once Richard met them, he would say, `I need some
money for Albuquerque vets.' He used the medal, but not to advance his
personal life. He did it to advance the life of the vet."

He started a program to counsel the families of
veterans. A shelter for homeless vets. One-stop shops for counseling, health
care, job advice or a blanket.

He persuaded legislators and then voters to let all
veterans into state-run colleges for free. He got funding to start a veterans'
nursing home in Truth or Consequences.

His compassion had its limits.

"When people got out of line, he would take them
aside and, as we would say, counsel them," Pe¤a says. "Sometimes,
it would take a bit of physical counseling.

"Richard's strictly a guy from the barrio, a
prototype pachuco. But he also knows the circles of power, so he can get
around there or on the streets."

Caubarreaux warned Rocco that he was giving too much of
his life to veterans. Two marriages had failed. The crush of working full-time
jobs and shepherding programs for vets had worn him down.

"The man has tremendous passion and compassion for
his fellow man," Caubarreaux says. "But he spent so little time for
himself."

In 1991, during Desert Storm, Rocco went back on active
duty at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. When he returned, he was two-stepping
at Caravan East when he met Maria Chavez Schneider, assistant director of New
Mexico AIDS Services.

They fell in love and soon were married. In 1992, both
burned out by work, they followed a dream to Mexico. For six years, they lived
it in San Miguel de Allende - gardening, cooking, romping on the beach and
letting it go, letting it all go.

* * * "He told me he had won the New Mexico Chile
Cook-Off before he ever told me he had won the Medal of Honor," Maria
Rocco says. "We'll go to the White House two or three times a year, and
he'll talk to the president of the United States the same as the guy who
delivered dirt to us in Mexico."

She smiles at her husband's humility, but isn't about to
ignore his heroism.

When they moved to San Antonio in 1998, she opened the
boxes that Rocco had stashed away. The contents now splay across the walls and
shelves of his home office.

Plaque upon plaque. Picture upon picture. Rocco with
President Reagan. Rocco with President Clinton. Rocco with Carlos Santana.
Rocco with the San Antonio Spurs.

Tacked to the bulletin board is the most recent picture.
In it, a clutch of teen-age boys in orange jumpsuits surround a man wearing
the Medal of Honor.

The youths, all of them on the verge of bad lives, are
part of a boot camp. Rocco visits it once a month to tell them how a stint in
the military can reverse bad lives.

So far, he has recruited 70 kids.

He helped start Veterans Against Violence and Drugs, a
school-room program that is spreading nationwide.

After three decades of giving his all to veterans, Rocco
is giving his all to children.

"The legacy I would like to have left is that these
kids would have values of honesty, integrity, patriotism, loyalty and
compassion," he says haltingly, his pauses laden with pain. "Their
parents apparently aren't instilling those in them, and they're growing up
with no thought as to which direction they're going."

Sort of like a long-lost teenage boy standing before the
familiar face of Sgt. Martinez.

In January, doctors discovered the pneumonia they had
been treating in Rocco was cancer. They gave him six to eight months to live.

Nearly 10 months have passed.

"He's stubborn," Maria says proudly.

He is in his second round of chemotherapy, this time
with an aggressive, experimental drug. Part of a lung was removed, and he
spent four weeks in a hospital bed, losing 40 pounds of mostly muscle.

He suspects the cancer is linked to Agent Orange - a
link that the Veterans' Administration just acknowledged for Vietnam veterans,
but only those with pancreatic cancer.

Who knows how many more acknowledgements are to come,
Rocco asks, for the ailments of Vietnam vets, Gulf War vets, Somalia vets?

That his death might come belatedly from Vietnam could
be the final insult from the country he served, the country he loves. Rocco
shrugs.

"There are two ways to look at it," he says.
"They used Agent Orange to defoliate the vegetation that was killing us.
The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong would hide behind it, ambush us.

"We couldn't defend ourselves without it. We didn't
know that, later on, it would come to plague us."

His three grown children and five grandchildren visit
often. His parents have helped him with final arrangements. A funeral in San
Antonio, burial at Fort Sam Houston.

The medal will go to his oldest son, Roy Rocco.

Richard Rocco is tired and he is in pain. He stares
through a window at the world beyond his reach. He has been all over that
world, suffered in that world, recovered in that world, and frolicked in that
world.

"It doesn't bother me anymore," he says of
what his country demanded and what it later delivered. "I'm at peace. I'm
going to die. I don't want to die angry."

Here is the text of the citation that accompanied Louis
Richard Rocco's Medal of Honor, awarded to him in 1974:

Warrant Officer Rocco distinguished himself when he
volunteered to accompany a medical evacuation team on an urgent mission to
evacuate eight critically wounded Army of the Republic of Vietnam personnel.
As the helicopter approached the landing zone, it became the target for
intense enemy automatic weapons fire.

Disregarding his own safety, WO Rocco identified and
placed accurate suppressive fire on the enemy positions as the aircraft
descended toward the landing zone. Sustaining major damage from the enemy
fire, the aircraft was forced to crash land, causing WO Rocco to sustain a
fractured wrist and hip and a severely bruised back.

Ignoring his injuries, he extracted the survivors from
the burning wreckage, sustaining burns to his own body.

Despite intense enemy fire, WO Rocco carried each
unconscious man across approximately 20 meters of exposed terrain to the Army
of the Republic of Vietnam perimeter. On each trip, his severely burned hands
and broken wrist caused excruciating pain, but the lives of the unconscious
crash survivors were more important than his personal discomfort, and he
continued his rescue efforts.

Once inside the friendly position, WO Rocco helped
administer first aid to his wounded comrades until his wounds and burns caused
him to collapse and lose consciousness.

His bravery under fire and intense devotion to duty were
directly responsible for saving three of his fellow soldiers from certain
death.

His unparalleled bravery in the face of enemy fire, his
complete disregard for his own pain and injuries, and his performance were far
above and beyond the call of duty and were in keeping with the highest
traditions of self sacrifice and courage of the military service.